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Tracking SEO 'Broad Match' Keywords in Google Analytics

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Tracking keyword performance in Google Analytics is, in theory, easy to do and very flexible. Using customised reports and filters, you can drill down into data, filter items, create custom variables and present the information in ways which will usually be sufficient to answer your questions.

But what about producing reports to compare groups of very similar keywords? The term ‘broad match’ is usually reserved for paid search, but as SEO managers, we often want to track the performance of terms we are optimising, including their close variations. There is no default report in Google Analytics to help you with this, but you can use existing features to help you build it yourself.

If you are interested in extending your SEO keyword reporting, or at least trying something new, this article is for you. So let’s get started.

Here you have your normal Organic traffic keyword report:

In this report it is very easy to see the performance of each individual keyword (as long as it isn’t grouped in among the dreaded ‘not provided’).

Say I am optimising for the keyword “best accounting software”. The organic search term report will easily tell me how many visits, pages/visit, goal conversions and more that were attributed to this one keyword. However, if I just glance at that one line, I will be missing out on the performance of the many similar keywords, which might also benefit from the SEO I undertake on that term. Examples, things like “best accounting software 2013” or “the best accounting software”.

This is where filters come in.

Use Your Filters

You can use a simple filter like this:

Or if you want to be really tricky, you can click on ‘advanced’ and make you filter as simple or elaborate as you want.

This will give you a filtered view of the same report, but only for the keywords matching that filter. Now you have a ‘broader’ match view of your performance on that particular keyword.

Of course, in SEO, we would very rarely be tracking just one keyword. Say another keyword of mine is ‘cheapest accounting software’ – I can do the same filters for that and get the same report style. But the annoying part comes when I want to compare my ‘broader’ matched ‘best accounting software’ with my broader matched ‘cheaper accounting software’. I can’t easily show these two groups in the same report and compare their performance.

Google Analytics Advanced Segments

Advanced segments can help you solve this problem. They allow you to choose up to 4 traffic segments to compare in the one table and graph.

To make the segments, you simply click on advanced segments in the top left of any report screen (it isn’t specific to the report you are in).

Then click on ‘New Custom Segment’ in the bottom right of the box, which will take you to this screen:

Once you have created your segments, you can look at them in any report across your account. (Keep in mind though, not all segments will make sense in all reports. (E.g., these segments won’t make sense if I am looking in the Adwords campaign report).

Since I want to look at traffic, I will go to the organic traffic report, click on advanced segments and check the check boxes of all my new segments.

This will give me a result like this:

Here I can easily see how my ‘broader’ matched keywords have performed over time and what they look like compared as line items.

While this article is focused on grouping your SEO keywords, there are lots of other segmentations you could do with your keywords – the most obvious being branded vs. non-branded keywords.

Combine with Customised Reports

Yes, this is great, but you know what would make it even better? Combining it with customised reports! This way I can make it even more tailored to my needs.

For this example I am going to create a very simple custom report to show to my clients, reporting only on the things they’re interested in (usually visits and conversions). The beauty of custom reports is that you can make them as complicated or as simple as you want.

Click on the Customisation section in the top ribbon then ‘create custom report’. The following is how I have created my simple report.

When you open it up, at first it will look very plain, but after you apply your advanced segments, it will turn into this:

Combine With Shortcuts!

If you love this report as much as I do, you should save it in your Shortcuts within Google Analytics, which will make it easily accessible from your home (or any) page and you won't have to reapply your advanced segments every time you go in.

In my shortcuts list on the left you can see a number of SEO reports. Since Google Analytics will only let you use 4 advanced segments at a time, I group my keywords together into separate reports – SEO Tier 1 Keywords, SEO Tier 2 Keywords, etc.

To do this I simply open up my customised report, apply the advanced segments I am interested in and then click on the ‘shortcut’ button (top right of any report). This will save a version of the custom report with those particular advanced segments applied. Repeat this for each set of keywords you want.

Do you currently do this, or something like it? Do you know of a way it can be done easier/better?

Please let us know your tips/advice in the comments below!

About TracyMu —
Tracy contributes to the MooMu Media blog, which is a mixture of SEO strategies, PPC how to's, social media tips, analytics advice and industry updates.

26 Comments

Thanks so much for sharing this Tracy. It's for actionable articles like this that I constantly return to SEOmoz / YOUmoz. Will play around with creating a report to better track broad keywords so I can squeeze more value from Google Analytics.

Jeffrey, thank you for this comment! When we give feedback to YouMoz submissions, we often include that we're looking for more actionable information in posts. It's good to hear those same words, unprompted, from a community member. I'm glad you're finding these types of posts at Moz.

Nice tutorial Tracy!I really like the idea of tracking broad keywords with Google analytics. Tracking broad keywords should give more accurate results about popularity of product or service than tracking keywords independently. Even is your visitors search for the same thing, they will probably search with many variations of keywords.

Thanks Bojan!You're right, I think customers will search with many variations, so you need to think carefully about how you set up your filters to catch them

EDIT: In the example shown I used regex in the advanced filters, and utilised pipes ( | ). In retrospect, pipes probably weren't the right choice for this example, but everyone needs to choose the filter which suits their needs.

The overall approach here is great. I'm not sure the regular expression in the example here does quite what you think though."best|accounting|software" matches anything containing either 'best' OR 'accounting' OR 'software'. ie, in the results will be every phrase that included the word 'best' (whether or not it related to accounting software).I know it's just an example, but I thought worth mentioning for those who might carbon copy it thinking it behaves differently to this.

So for piece of mind would it be best to put each word or perimeter you are wanting to filter into a¬†separate¬†line. I tend to do this when using filters on the fly and so far for customized¬†Analytics¬†as well. Am I being over the top, following best practice or just¬†skinning¬†the cat a different way?¬†

DanBarker - Yes you are right, apologies for that - I had only noticed after it went live, and wrote a comment to Bojan about it above.¬†(I use pipes a lot for excluding all different types of brand terms, and accidentally used it here).

Geoff Hirst: I wanted to use a simple example here just to demonstrate, but actually regex can be very complicated when you want to use an 'and' operator. So, a separate line for each word is a good choice and not¬†'over the top' ¬†at all.

Great post, I've been a fan of exporting CSV's and scanning the crap out of them to gain more information.. Analytics is 1 of the most amazing tools but so underused in our Industry.. This post has just given me another reason to look at it in more detail..I really need to spend 1-2 weeks training myself for Excel, Analytics & general math/metrics..

Tracy, I will need to study this a bit and bookmark it but you explain very well how to get more out of GA for the small business...and i do want to be better at grouping keywords and analyzing them..thanks!

No problem ginnyl, thanks for commenting :)The first time you do it it might take a bit of time, but the beauty is, that afterwards you will have saved the reports, and be able to easily use them hundreds of time in the future.

I think this is a great way to give clients a more complete view of their SEO campaign. Grouping those broad keywords takes all those variations with one or two visitors and pulls them together so clients can see the real value of the long tail. 1-2 visitors might not seem like a lot but 1-2 visitors times 100 keywords is suddenly a lot more impressive.

That's a good idea. Nothing is very complicated in this post but it's a nice suggestion. It's not about what is hard to do but what is practical to do and actually think about doing it so thanks for that!

The strength of this article is that it reminds us how powerful Google Analytics can be if we take the extra time to learn about all its capabilities. Setting up shortcuts and custom reports can really make it a secret weapon and your tips about broad search keyword terms are yet another example of this.

Nice work Tracy. There's growing recognition that "long tail" metrics offer actionable insight, especially compared to the positions of individual keywords, which are often no more than vanity metrics.